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A linguist who began to train her border collie for sheepdog competitions using a dog whistle realized that the commands reminded her of language. The article goes on to detail communication between dogs and people, and how dog's cognition and understanding goes past following basic commands. For example, Chaser, the border collie, was able to fast map and learn things through reference cues - which goes much farther past simply understanding commands. It turns out, shepherds use only a few whistle commands with their sheepdogs, but the whistles change meaning based on situation, pitch, speed, etc, and provide information to the dog, similar to prosody, a key part of human language.

ATLANTA - Sky is playing and playing. His mom tells him to take a break and drink some water. He does. A little while later, after they play some more, his mom tells him to go lay down. He does. Sky is a Border Collie. His mom is Doctor Melody Jackson.